Nicktoons
Nicktoons is a franchise of television cartoon shows that are produced and aired by Nickelodeon. Prior to 1991, Nickelodeon had aired foreign-made animated films since its inception. It first experimented with its own animated programming in 1980, when the channel's first president Geraldine Laybourne commissioned a series with animated elements, Video Comic Book, and produced a fully-animated show titled Video Dream Theatre. The second series was left unaired, and throughout the next decade, animated fare on Nickelodeon comprised mostly of reruns of other companies' cartoons. The idea for another attempt at original animated shows on the network began in the late 1980s. Starting in 1989, profits from other programs funded "Nicktoons", with the first three cartoons (Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show) premiering on Sunday, August 11, 1991. This format was repeated every Sunday, eventually leading to the production of more Nicktoons at Nickelodeon Animation Studio. A spin-off channel named after Nicktoons was established on May 1, 2002. In the early 2010s, Nickelodeon Animation Studio began to produce Nicktoons based on pre-existing franchises that had been purchased by Viacom: Winx Club (in 2011) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (in 2012). Both shows had unprecedentedly high budgets for Nicktoons, and an extensive team of Nickelodeon veterans grouped to work on Winx Club. Since 2002, the official slogan for the brand has been "Not just cartoons, they're Nicktoons". History Pinwheel, the first Nickelodeon series which began in 1977, was formatted as an hour-long program with two forms of segments: original content with its cast of puppet and human characters, and showcases of foreign-made short films. Many of these films were animated cartoons dating back to the 1950s. These were the first form of animated content on what would become Nickelodeon. For its first years, Nickelodeon continued to play foreign-made cartoons in a similar fashion as part of two anthology series called First Row Features and Special Delivery. In 1980, the channel aired its first original series that was not live-action: Video Comic Book. It could best be described as a "motion comic" that consisted of illustrated scenes with animated elements, like speech bubbles and moving backgrounds. Nickelodeon's first attempt at a fully-animated show occurred later in 1980, when Geraldine Laybourne produced test pilots for Video Dream Theatre. It holds the title of Nickelodeon's first true cartoon. However, it was left unaired when test audiences did not give the reactions Laybourne wanted. Throughout the 1980s, the amount of acquired animated shows on Nickelodeon increased, with reruns of cartoons and anime such as Bananaman, Danger Mouse, The Little Prince, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Blocks dedicated to animated programming such as Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon ran from the mid-1980s well into the late 1990s. When Nick Jr. premiered as a block in January 1988, much of its shows were imported cartoons. Profits from Nickelodeon's expanding audience at the time helped it fund its own original cartoons: the first three "Nicktoons", Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Nickelodeon executive Vanessa Coffey discovered all three of these programs after traveling to Los Angeles in 1988. Her goal was to find "three projects that looked completely different" in order to counter the homogeneous, toy-centric cartoons of the 1980s. Nickelodeon's animation production studio was originally known as Games Animation, located in Studio City, California. In 1993, Nickelodeon approached Joe Murray to create its first fully original in-house series: Rocko's Modern Life. In March 1998, the then-new Nickelodeon Animation Studio was opened in Burbank, California. In September 1999, Nickelodeon opened a digital animation studio in Manhattan, which took over animation of Nick Jr. series such as Blue's Clues. Throughout the 1990s, Nickelodeon continued with its "experimental" approach to animation. Hey Arnold! creator Craig Bartlett explained that the network gradually shifted away from creator-driven content during the later years of Herb Scannell's tenure as Nick president. In his opinion, the animation department "grew more and more corporate, and less like you had a personal touch". In May 2002, Nicktoons TV, a sister channel named after Nicktoons, was created. In 2016, Nickelodeon moved its animation facilities to a different building in Burbank that houses both animated and live-action properties. List of Nicktoons Upcoming Nicktoons Animation showcases The following three shows are usually excluded from Nickelodeon's lists of Nicktoons, as they heavily feature pilots that Nickelodeon does not own the rights to. Some shows that were spawned from these showcases were picked up by other networks, such as the KaBlam! segment Angela Anaconda (greenlit by Teletoon and Fox Kids) and the Random! Cartoons pilot "Adventure Time" (greenlit by Cartoon Network). DreamWorks co-productions The following shows were spun off from DreamWorks Animation's film franchises. While they were co-produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio and Viacom owns half of each show's copyright, Nickelodeon has excluded them from their Nicktoon compilations since 2016, when DreamWorks was purchased by NBCUniversal and stopped licensing their characters to Nick. Miniseries The following miniseries were produced by Nick Animation, but they were never green-lit for full seasons. Acquired shows Please see Non-original shows broadcast by Nickelodeon for a list of cartoons that have aired on a Nick channel but were not produced by Nickelodeon. Movies based on Nicktoons Theatrical films Upcoming theatrical films Direct-to-video and made-for-TV films Television on net films Upcoming television on net films Trivia *''SpongeBob SquarePants'' currently holds the record for longest-running Nicktoon, which had previously been held by Rugrats, surpassing that show's run (in terms of number of episodes) when SpongeBob aired its 172nd episode on April 10, 2012. However, with two spin-offs, Rugrats still has the most shows featuring its characters as of 2019. **The Rugrats Pre-School Daze miniseries holds the record for shortest-lived Nicktoon (18 days in the U.S. and just 5 in the United Kingdom) and the least amount of episodes (4). *''The Fairly OddParents'' was the first Nicktoon to ever reach ten seasons, even before SpongeBob SquarePants, which was still in its ninth season, when the first episode of Season 10, "The Big Fairy Share Scare!" premiered. *The ninth season of SpongeBob SquarePants took almost five years to air all 26 episodes, lasting from July 21, 2012 to February 20, 2017. This is the longest time a single Nicktoon season has lasted on the main Nickelodeon channel. *Several Nicktoons have never finished airing on the main Nickelodeon network. As an example, two episodes of As Told by Ginger remain unaired in the United States as of 2019. *In North America, almost all Nicktoons are distributed on home video by Paramount, which has been a subsidiary of Nickelodeon's parent company Viacom since 1994. **From August 1993 to October 1996, all Nicktoon videotapes (and all Nickelodeon videotapes in general) were distributed by Sony Wonder. **Shout! Factory has held the home video distribution rights to Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Angry Beavers, CatDog, The Wild Thornberrys and Danny Phantom since May 2011. Shout! also had the video rights for Hey Arnold! and Rocko's Modern Life from then until 2018, at which point their rights reverted to Paramount. **After DreamWorks Animation ended all partnerships with Viacom, distribution rights for their three Nicktoon co-productions (The Penguins of Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, and Monsters vs. Aliens) transferred to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, who released all of the Legends of Awesomeness and Monsters vs. Aliens DVDs. *Most Nicktoons are majority-produced in the United States with their final animation processes outsourced to service companies in Asia. Exceptions include: **The Nickelodeon episodes of Doug, co-produced with the French studio Ellipse Programmé. **The Nickelodeon episodes of Winx Club, co-produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio and their Italian sister company (through Viacom), Rainbow Group. Nick Animation handled script writing, voice recording, animation approval, and some of the music production while coordinating with the Italian team. *The Nicktoons brand also extends to other media, such as video games featuring the Nicktoon characters (including the Nicktoons Unite! series). *As it is technically a live-action show, Mr. Meaty has not been recognized as an official Nicktoon. It is still a Viacom-owned production. *When Nickelodeon repackaged the Action League Now! shorts into a half-hour block, the "new" show was occasionally advertised among the full-fledged Nicktoons. The package show is otherwise excluded from all of Nick's Nicktoon lists, and it was not produced by Nick Animation. See also *Nickelodeon Movies *Nicktoons (TV channel) References de:Nicktoons fr:Nicktoons (chaîne) pl:Nicktoon pt-br:Nicktoons (Canal de TV) Category:Nicktoons Category:Nickelodeon Category:Lists